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Former Obama administration Syria adviser Fred Hof said the administration seemed inclined to act in Iraq because of a looming genocide against a religious sect known as the Yazidis but less open to action in Syria which may not fall in exactly the same category but still involves killing of civilians on a huge scale.

“The administration has been quick to deny that the Assad regime’s impressive portfolio of war crimes and crimes against humanity adds up to genocide,” Hof wrote on the Atlantic Council blog. “It is as if genocide provides more of a humanitarian intervention mandate than mere mass homicide.”

Ryan Goodman, a professor of international human rights law at New York University, said Obama’s actions “suggest we’re in a trajectory toward muscular humanitarianism.”

However, Goodman said the factors the president set forth as limits really aren’t that rare or unusual, opening the door in theory to intervention in all kinds of ethnic strife and attacks on civilians.

“I thought the language the president used, the three criteria he articulated … were really quite open-ended and it’s difficult to find a natural breaking point on that or a limiting principle,” Goodman said. “We’re seeing weaker states around the world with strong armed opposition groups, that makes it easy to get a mandate to invite us in and we could make a difference. … It’s difficult to see the stopping point — for good or for ill.”

The recent history of such interventions has been that those that go poorly sometimes deter future actions, but the effect tends to erode over time. “The ‘Black Hawk Down’ effect of Somalia apparently slowed the Clinton administration in Bosnia,” Goodman noted. “The military success or failure of each one I do think kind of builds up for the next.”

One area where Obama was ambiguous about his latest decision is whether the U.S. is responding solely to a universal humanitarian obligation to act in the face of genocide or whether the history of U.S. involvement in Iraq gave Obama an added imperative.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest noted the history of American troops and taxpayers relating to Iraq, but didn’t directly answer when asked whether that was a factor in the decision to try to rescue the Yazidis.

“It does speak to the commitment of the American people to stand alongside the people of Iraq even in very difficult times,” Earnest said Friday. “There’s no doubt that the history is pretty obvious. What’s harder to assess is what consequence that has for our ongoing national security and how decisions are made for our ongoing national security.”

One expert said it’s unwise to take all the rhetoric surrounding a purportedly humanitarian intervention at face value.

“In this humanitarian versus more realist-pragmatists debate, I look more at what they do than what they say,” said Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress and the Albright Stonebridge Group. “What they say sometimes tends to confuse, they wrap up action in moral values framework when what I think guides them more strongly are these practical considerations. … It’s a very realist, in that sense, administration. It has strands of humanitarian interests and moral values are important, but I don’t think that latter thing drives things.”

Katulis said he’s doubtful that Obama’s decision to use the military to act on humanitarian grounds in Iraq portends an end to his characteristic reluctance to do that in other cases.

“He’s a very cautious, look-before-you-leap type leader. … People like to pretend that Obama’s some kind of pacifist. He’s not. He’s first and foremost a pragmatist,” Katulis said. “A lot of people in the administration have argued for the use of force in other cases. … This is a very defined instance in which somebody made a convincing case to the commander in chief that the U.S. could have some impact.”